Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/78

50 relation between Europe, Asia, and America in the Meiocene age than at the present time.

The number of European species is estimated by Professor Heer at about 3000, of which 920 have been collected in Switzerland. The cycads, so abundant in the Secondary period, are represented by two species, while of the cypresses one (Glyptostrobus) is to be met with in Eastern Asia; another (Taxodium distichum), found in the fossil state in Spitzbergen, Alaska, and Italy, is that which gives its name to the cypress swamps of the Southern States and of South America. The Libocedrus is now only to be found in California, Chili, and Australia, and the Widdringtonia in South Africa and Madagascar, all being exotic and tropical or sub-tropical. The mammoth tree and red wood tree of California lived in the Meiocene forests from the Mediterranean to the Arctic circle. In Switzerland a Puya, like that of Chili, represents the exotic pine-apple family, and a large-leaved ginger contributed greatly to the tropical character of the foliage.

The Meiocene palms were represented in the Swiss forests by at least eleven species, which may be grouped into fan-palms (see Fig. 8), with the leaflets all diverging from the tip of the leaf-stalks, and the feather-palms, in which they spring right and left from the foot-stalk. To the former belong the dwarf fan-palm, the Sabal major, which then lived in central Italy and northern Germany as far as 51° N., bearing a strong resemblance to the shadow-palm of the West Indies. A second agrees with the swamp palmetto of the Southern States in its small leaves, while the leaves of a third are estimated by Professor Heer to have been no less than six or seven feet broad; they sprang from a lofty trunk, and